Every generation of Welsh football fans finds their own special moment of heartbreak. I wasn’t alive to witness the great robbery of 1977 when a Maradona-grade handball decision sent Scotland to the 1978 World Cup at our expense and I was a touch too young to have my hopes and dreams brutally crushed by Paul Bodin’s missed penalty of 1993, which would have taken us to USA 94. Instead, I had to wait for 2003 at the Millennium Stadium, watching Wales take on Russia for a spot at the 2004 Euros. It was a match so drab that our fans started chanting “USA, USA, USA”, as though all we had to get excited about was the cold war. In the end, that chant turned out to be weirdly prescient. A few days after our 0-1 defeat, one of the Russian players, Yegor Titov, tested positive for Bromantan, a cold war-era drug allegedly used by the Russian military to give their troops extra stamina. The Welsh FA protested to Uefa, but the result was not overturned and so a new age of Wales supporters had their defining moment of pain.
